I used to make music on computers when I was a teenager. I used to spend hours in my room on a MIDI sequencer with a keyboard, a synthesiser and a mouse. These tracks were all MIDI. No they didn’t sound awful I had a nice sound module, but they do sound a bit dated now. But that was MIDI.

I very clearly remember a turning point. The day I bought my first (and, it turns out only) microphone. A Røde NT1A vocal mic.

After Dawn’s slipping out, she was power-washed and given a new coat of bitumen. All the way up to the gunwales. Very smart. Especially compared to her prior grubby state. As on Friday, the slipping back into the water happened before work!

Last night I got a call out of the blue from Jon Ody asking if I wanted my boat Dawn’s hull blacking. It’s something that needs to be done every couple of years and I was starting to think about it anyway. The catch: it had to be done tomorrow morning and he needed a decision promptly, as he had a free slot in the boatyard. It didn’t help that it would make me homeless for the weekend.

I picked up an outside light, the kind that you plug in and stick in your lawn, going cheap at B&Q. Although it said it had blue LEDs (I’ve never claimed to have much style but anything with blue LEDs in it is an unforgivable faux-pas) I had a roll of white LEDs at home. It was a nice sealed unit (no IP rating but it looked solid enough) which I thought would come in handy for stickig on the outside of my boat and shining at things.

It’s no secret that golang is my new favourite language. I’ve used it to implement the latest folktunefinder search engine and really enjoyed it.

On an unrelated note, whilst looking at what libraries are available I came across the gosndfile library written by Matt Kane / @nynexrepublic. It’s a wrapper for libsndfile, a C library for reading and writing sound files.

If you declare a variable or import a package in Go, that’s a compiler error. Good thing too, in my opinion. But this one was puzzling. It wasn’t complaining about an imported package, it was complaining about a function within a package. As far as I’m aware, the syntax of Go allows only for importing a whole package (or sub-package) at a time, rather than members of that package (as Python does).

The odd thing was that the error was reported on the last line of the file. The entire contents of that line was: